Thursday, June 11, 2020

The World's Smallest Grasshopper

I saw this little fellow on one of my cotton plants the other day and I've been photographing him with different cameras, trying to get a clear shot of him. He's about 1/3 the length of my thumb and even my Nikon D60 Artillery Piece in macro mode struggles to get a good photo.

He's stayed on the same plant the whole time, one of my red foliated cottons. That's fortunate because his light green shows up well against the maroon of the leaf.

I left the photos pretty big, so I think they're worth a click. Enjoy!

This is the best shot I've gotten to date. He's pretty crisp here. He's so small that the camera usually focuses on the background leaf and that's enough to make him blurry.

Here, you see him on the full leaf. Note that this is a young leaf, still only about 1/4 the size it will eventually reach. When I say this guy is tiny, I mean he's really tiny.

1 comment:

tim eisele said...

He is a cutie. I'm always amused by the way grasshopper nymphs look so stumpy until their wings grow in, at which point they suddenly get much longer.

"He's so small that the camera usually focuses on the background leaf "

Yeah, autofocus is practically useless for macrophotography because of this. I always turn off autofocus for insect pictures, and stop down the aperture as much as I can get away with to maximize the depth of field. Then I manually focus as close as I can, and slowly rock back and forth while firing off shot after shot in hopes that some of them will come out right.